“Really? There are search engines other than Google? Why?”

It’s no secret that Google rules the online search world, but there are other options available. What’s more, some of these alternative search engines are hugely popular in their own right – they just don’t appear very popular when compared to the colossal titan that is Google. Some of these alternative search engines seem like ancient relics left over from the birth of the internet many moons ago. Others dominate a specific region, such as China, South Korea, or the Czech Republic. So buckle up. Here are the top search engines in the world.

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The Best Search Engine in The World: Google

Worldwide Search Engine Market Share: 92.18% It’s difficult to comprehend Google’s epic size. The search engine is so popular that it’s many times larger than all of the world’s other search engines combined. Specifically, Google currently holds a whopping 92.18 percent of the worldwide search engine market share. The search engine was born in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, but here’s the fun part: the two partners actually offered to sell Google in 1999 to internet company Excite for just $750,000. Excite rejected the offer and have spent the last 20 years kicking themselves. Today, Google and its parent company Alphabet are worth a staggering $750+ billion. As a result, Page, Alphabet’s CEO, is the eighth-richest person in the world with a reported net worth of $53.5 billion, and Brin, Alphabet’s President, is the ninth-richest person with a reported net worth of $52.1 billion. Also, fun fact: The name “Google” is derived from the word “googol.” A googol is a mathematical term meaning “10 raised to the power of 100” or 1 with 100 zeros after it.

These days, Google is far more than a search engine.

The company has developed many other software solutions such as Google Drive. It owns YouTube, has developed a line of smartphones and laptops, and has even created self-driving cars. Google also powers other search engines – including Ask, which is the sixth largest search engine in the world. The search engine giant is also constantly updating its search engine results page to provide a range of helpful content formats, such as Google’s Featured Snippets. All hail the mighty Google.

Search Engine #2. Bing

Worldwide Search Engine Market Share: 8.04% Bing is the second largest search engine in the world with an 8.04 percent market share While Bing is small in comparison to Google, it maintains a respectable market share in many countries. The search engine is owned and operated by Microsoft and has its origins in the previous search engines MSN Search and Windows Live Search. Just like Google, the search engine also filters search results into different tabs such as images, videos, maps, and news. Unlike Google, Bing’s homepage always features a stunning image and news stories. In July 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo!’s search engine – which is currently the fourth largest search engine in the world. Businesses shouldn’t disregard this search engine. Although it doesn’t have as many users as Google, Bing still receives 1.3 billion visits per month. Plus, with most businesses and experts focusing their attention on Google, there’s less competition on Bing. So, Bing advertising and SEO are certainly worth considering.

Search Engine #3. Baidu

Worldwide Search Engine Market Share: 7.34% Meet Baidu, the third-largest search engine with a 7.34 percent market share. This search engine is China’s largest. In fact, Baidu absolutely dominates the Chinese market with 74.73 percent of the market as of February 2019. In comparison, Google has managed to capture only 2 percent of China’s search engine market. Baidu was founded in 2000 and has its headquarters in China’s capital, Beijing. It’s one of the largest artificial intelligence and internet service companies in the world. That said, Baidu holds very little influence outside of China. It’s worth noting that China has the “largest and most sophisticated online censorship operation in the world.” This is often referred to as “The Great Firewall of China.” So, for Western search engines like Google to enter the Chinese market, they must comply with strict and complex censorship laws and regulations.

Search Engine #4.Yahoo!

Worldwide Search Engine Market Share: 3.39% Yahoo! Lands fourth place in the list of the world’s largest search engines with a 3.39 percent share of the global market. Yahoo!’s story is as interesting as it is embarrassing. The company was founded way back in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo. They originally named the website, “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” before quickly renaming it Yahoo!, which stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Organized Oracle.” Yahoo! Mail and other web services propelled the company to a valuation of $125 billion in 2000. But then things went downhill. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell Google to Yahoo! in 1998 for a measly $1,000,000. Yahoo! turned them down. Then, despite having a huge head start and far more resources, Yahoo! Mail lost to Gmail,  Yahoo! Answers lost to Quora, and Yahoo!’s Flickr lost to Instagram. Ouch. Today, Yahoo!’s search engine is actually powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. So the results from both search engines are very similar.

Search Engine #5. Yandex

Worldwide Search Engine Market Share: 1.53% Yandex scores the fifth position on the list of the top 10 search engines with a global market share of 1.53 percent. It’s the most popular search engine in Russia with 55% of total Russian search traffic, closely followed by Google. The search engine is also popular in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey. Yandex provides more than 70 different services, including tools such as Yandex Disk, a cloud-based storage service similar to Google Drive. The name “Yandex” was adopted in 1993 and stands for “Yet Another iNDEXer.” One of its key advantages for Russian-language users is its ability to understand Russian inflection in search queries. In Russian, words can take on more than 20 different endings to indicate their relationship to one another. “While this makes the language precise,” says MIT linguistics professor David Pesetsky, “it makes search extremely difficult.” Back in 2011, Yandex went public on the New York Stock Exchange with an initial public offering (IPO) of 1.3 billion – making it the second largest in the sector after Google at the time.